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Article History

Received: 26 September 2020

Accepted: 9 December 2020

First Online: 26 February 2021

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Ethical approval has been obtained from the respective country National/Institution Ethics Committees Ethics Committees, Malawi University College of Medicine Research Ethics Committee (P.01/19/2582); Ethiopia, AHRI Research Ethics Committee (P011/19). For Rwanda, additional scientific review approval was given by Ministry of Health/ National Health Research Committee. Each study participant will be recruited after voluntary acceptance and verbal or signed consent to participate in the study (recruitment has been done in 3 countries as at the time of developing this protocol paper). Verbal consents will be sought and obtained based on the ethics agreement in each country, under a witness (a community member) and the local research team members. The research assistants will explain the study using the study information sheet before the consent, and sign off the consent forms, and give each potential participant a copy. Data will be stored in secured repositories approved by the ethics committees of each country. Data sharing agreement will be signed by each participating country, and data archiving will be undertaken at each country, and only data with identifiers carefully removed will be shared for joint analyses purpose.

: The individual details, images or videos are not included in this articles, and hence no need for con Consent for publication.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests” in this section.